SCHIIT STACK WITH SURROUND SOUND FULL
SCHIIT STACK WITH SURROUND SOUND WINDOWS

It has no virtual surround support of its own, so you will be reliant on software-based solutions - and none of them are as good as the hardware-based solutions in my opinion. There is absolutely no point in buying a stereo DAC for gaming. It sounds more natural to me, and I'd only use Sonic / Atmos in games that support object-based audio.

SCHIIT STACK WITH SURROUND SOUND WINDOWS

I also prefer the Creative virtual surround solutions (CMSS-3D / SBX Surround) to Windows Sonic / Dolby Atmos for Headphones for 7.1 virtual surround. This is a universal solution which works with all games. The sound card then takes that multichannel signal and applies their virtual surround processing to it before outputting that to your headphones. With a 5.1 or 7.1 sound card that supports virtual surround, the device is set to 5.1 / 7.1 in Windows, so the game will output a multichannel signal. This means that games which automatically set their output based on the channel layout specified in Windows will only output stereo audio - so virtual surround will not be applied at all. The main issue is that they automatically set the sound device to a 2 channel, 16-bit, 48kHz output when enabled, and changing that will disable them. Windows Sonic / Dolby Atmos for Headphones are good, but have a number of drawbacks. On top of that as mentioned most will set the number of channels to whatever the sound device is set up to. Instead they rarely if ever offer physics based acoustics, then on top of that they will flatten the 3D audio stage to 2d 5.1 or 7.1 sound stage. and allows you set this up from within the game with a good HRTF algorithm for your headphones or atmos mapping’s for an atmos speaker setup.Īlmost no games do this.

SCHIIT STACK WITH SURROUND SOUND FULL

The best possible scenario here is that the games audio engine implements a full 3D audio stage with physics based acoustics like reverberation, propagation, materials interaction etc. The issue is there are three links in the chain and they all need to be set up correctly for everything to work. Give them both a try and decide.Īnd yes this shit is more confusing that I aught to be. Mind you the asus card you have isn’t super top notch but I still bet it’s Dolby headphone positional audio will be better than the atmos one. Now make sure Dolby headphone is turned off in your sound card settings and turn on atmos. Some won’t though so set those to the 5.1 of your sound card too. If they have sound options that includes number of channels then some games will honor this in which case you can set it to 7.1 and then turn atmos on. Most games will then default to that output. So what you want is to have the sound device, ie your sound card set to 5.1 output. The issue is that a lot of games will default to stereo output if the sound device selected is set to stereo output.

Schiit stack with surround sound